Covid-19 roundup: HHS of­fi­cial Giroir takes on role of test­ing czar — cue new con­tro­ver­sy; Wuhan lab ve­he­ment­ly de­nies trig­ger­ing the pan­dem­ic

Brett Giroir, once in the run­ning to take on the man­tle of FDA com­mis­sion­er fol­low­ing the pop­u­lar Scott Got­tlieb’s abrupt de­par­ture, is Pres­i­dent Trump’s pick to over­see coro­n­avirus test­ing ef­forts, as short­falls con­tin­ue to be­dev­il the re­sponse to the pan­dem­ic. And it didn’t take long be­fore his en­try in­to the coro­n­avirus spot­light spurred a con­tro­ver­sy over his back­ground.

His ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing on vac­cine de­vel­op­ment projects at Texas A&M Uni­ver­si­ty helped pre­pare him for this his­toric mo­ment, Giroir said in a Wash­ing­ton Post re­port. But in 2015, the Post notes, he was giv­en half an hour to re­sign or be fired from the job at A&M af­ter an an­nu­al per­for­mance re­vealed he was more in­ter­est­ed in pro­mot­ing him­self than the health sci­ence cen­ter where he was em­ployed.

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